Barbarians at the Digital Gate

Its cyberattacks show the world the nature of the Chinese regime.

Updated Feb. 5, 2013 12:01 a.m. ET

On a visit to our offices last year, a U.S. lawmaker with knowledge of intelligence affairs explained that, when it comes to cyber-espionage, there are only two kinds of American companies these days: Those that have been hacked, and those that don't know they've been hacked.

So it comes as no great surprise to learn that The Wall Street Journal has also been hacked.

Specifically, the email accounts of under two dozen Journal editors, reporters and editorial writers have been hacked for months and maybe longer by the Chinese government. The hackers entered our systems and sought to monitor our China coverage. We identified the hacking last year and have taken steps to prevent it. The attack parallels similar Chinese infiltration of the New York Times, which believes the cyber-espionage originated with a Chinese military unit, as well as a hacking attempt last year against Bloomberg News.

We'll go out on a limb and assume these hacks stem from a common source. As for the Chinese motive, our friends at the Times think it was in connection to the paper's investigation of the fabulous family wealth of the former premier, "Grandpa"
Wen Jiabao.
Bloomberg believes it was hacked after publishing an exposé of the riches of the relatives of Xi Jinping, then China's vice president and now the general secretary.

For our part, we can think of any number of Journal stories that have embarrassed the Chinese regime, especially in connection to last year's downfall of Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai. The Chinese government has frequently objected to and censored these pages for writing about Chinese corruption or publishing the work of Chinese dissidents, Tibetan and Uighur freedom fighters, and others who have courageously stood up to Beijing's bullying. We'll take it as a badge of journalistic honor that some of our editorial-page writers were among those hacked.

The Journal's evidence is that the cyber-espionage goes well beyond specific stories to a general interest in sources and coverage. As companies from
Google
to Nortel to BAE Systems have discovered, hacking—both for purposes of monitoring and to steal commercial intellectual property or government secrets—has become the Chinese way.

That was also the conclusion of a bipartisan report last fall from the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The committee, led by Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger, investigated claims by Chinese telecom giants Huawei and ZTE that they were clean companies whose expansion efforts in the U.S. would pose no risk of cyber-espionage or other threats to critical infrastructure.

What it found instead, particularly in Huawei, was a company that was founded by a former director of the Chinese Army's Information Engineering Academy, had close links to the Communist Party, and had made deceptive claims about its ownership. "Companies around the United States have experienced odd or alerting incidents using Huawei or ZTE equipment," the report noted, though it left the specifics of those incidents to a classified annex. The companies deny any wrongdoing.

ENLARGE

Reuters/Stringer

We hope their denials are better grounded than the replies the Journal got from Chinese officials when confronted with evidence of hacking. "The Chinese government prohibits cyberattacks and has done what it can to combat such activities in accordance with Chinese laws," one Chinese Embassy spokesman told the Journal.

The statement is about as credible as an Andrei Gromyko nyet. When Chinese officials wonder why companies such as Huawei face an increasingly tough time making inroads and winning regulatory approval abroad, they might consider what their own Soviet-style snooping and stealing have done to China's international reputation.

***

The larger question is why the Chinese do this and what the regime's spying compulsions say about what it is.

In an op-ed in these pages last year, Mike McConnell, Michael Chertoff and William Lynn noted that "The Chinese government has a national policy of economic espionage in cyberspace." The three former national security officials chalked this up to Beijing's need for rapid economic growth to improve the lot of its people. "It is much more efficient for the Chinese to steal innovations and intellectual property," they wrote, "than to incur the cost and time of creating their own."

That's right as far as it goes, though nobody should get the idea that Beijing's cyberraids are part of some Robin Hood-like quest to spread the technological wealth around. A major reason the Chinese spy is because it comes naturally to a regime that feels threatened by the open exchange of information, and even by people's private thoughts. So it is with most despotisms.

Still, whatever else the Chinese thought they were doing by hacking us, they didn't stop the publication of a single article. Now they have only magnified their embarrassment, as their intrusion was eventually bound to be detected and publicized. Perhaps they will now try to deny us travel visas, harass our journalists or otherwise interfere with our business in China.

Meantime, we read that the FBI is investigating China's media hacking and treating it as a national security issue. It's also a plain-old crime, undertaken by a government that fancies itself the world's next superpower but acts like a giant thievery corporation.

The Middle Kingdom might once have been the center of human civilization. But in the digital world, the Chinese are the barbarians at the gate. Whatever they think they've learned about us by sneaking around our inboxes, the world has learned a great deal more about them.

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